In Volume 2 of the World of Warcraft Battleplan, Lead Producer Shane Dabiri gives players a glimpse of what the future holds for the world's most popular MMORPG. In addition to confirming that the game's expansion will be showcased at the upcoming BlizzCon event, he also discusses new dungeons, battlegrounds, improved talents, and even a new fee based character transfer service.

Here's a list of some of the upcoming content:

World Events We're also working on more dynamic interactions in the game. To this end, we're focused on launching new world events and expanding on some of the ones already available. Currently on the schedule is a Halloween-inspired event for Azeroth. We haven’t given the holiday a title yet, but players will definitely find a number of great things in store.

PvPAnother popular player request has been for us to increase outdoor PvP battles. Prior to the Battlegrounds, the outdoor landscape was fraught with PvP. However, once the Battlegrounds were introduced and NPC dishonorable kills were implemented, outdoor PvP greatly decreased. We want to bring back the hectic action of mass PvP, but with some improvements. One idea on the table is to place a capturable objective in the exterior environment. With something like this, we can encourage outdoor PvP again while centralizing the action to a designated location.

Talent Improvements We’re currently in the process of improving underused talents for all classes. The goal of the talent reevaluation is to allow all classes to have three viable talent trees to choose from. That is, each class should be able to pick from any tree available and still end up with a character that has desired utility in a specific role. The task is a major undertaking and one we're carrying out with great enthusiasm.

Character-Transfer Service Another feature of the Web site we'll be implementing is fee-based character transfers. This is a feature that's been very frequently requested and one which we want to provide for players as soon as we can. We'll offer character transfers from one realm to another, as well as allow players to move characters from one account to another. While we want to offer this service as a convenience, we also want to prevent its use for exploitive reasons, so there will be a time restriction to limit the frequency that a character can be moved.

Macgamestore.com has begun taking pre-orders for Stubbs The Zombie, the upcoming game from developer Wideload and publish Aspyr Media. The game is available for pre-order for $39.95.

In this game, players take on the role of the rebel himself Stubbs, a wisecracking Zombie who takes on an ultra-modern city of the future using nothing but his own carcass and the weapons of his possessed enemies. The game's tongue-in-cheek humor, innovative combat and strong storyline keep Stubbs the Zombie's gameplay as bizarre and unpredictable as its namesake.

Ubisoft has released the September content patch for Shadowbane. The patch changes the available times for capturing mines and starting sieges, makes quite a few general changes, and has changed the city, guild, and siege systems in the following ways:

• Banes may only occur during specified times of the day. Like mine windows, the defender chooses a time between two bounds (currently, the same times as mines). If the defender doesn't choose a time, the closest bound is chosen for them.

• Guild and nation leaders may set a message of the day for their members. It may be set from either an option in the Guild menu or from slash commands: "/SetNationMotD" and "/SetGuildMotD."

The Armchair Empire recently interviewed Chris Delay of Introversion Software about the developer's unusual real time strategy game, Darwinia. The interview covers a range of topics including the benefits and drawbacks of working at small independent game company. Delay also discusses how the team responds to negative reviews.

Reading positive reviews is easy. How does the team react to a negative review?

We’ve had a couple of really, really bad reviews. The websites responsible shall remain nameless in their shame, because we’ve had hundreds of extremely positive reviews, and it’s not that hard for us to disregard the bad reviews as simply the reviewer having a bad day and/or not getting it. The bad reviews that we’ve read tend to show a distinct lack of understanding of the sort of game they were playing – for example complaining that we don’t have the usual features you’d expect in an RTS. It’s like saying we’re not a very good first person shooter. We really don’t mind – we’ve linked to all the bad reviews on our website, and they always prove to be an interesting topic on the forums.

Blizzard has released a patch for their popular RTS title, StarCraft and its expansion StarCraft: Brood War. This patch, which is set at version 1.13d fixes one minor bug. The patch is now available for both Mac and Windows versions of the games.

Blizzard Entertainment recently updated their website with the results from the Starcraft Map Contest. The panel of judges selected five maps: Signal, King of the Abyss, Crusader, Nightlight, and the Roads to Antiga Prime. From the Blizzard website:

The five winning StarCraft maps that will be used in the BlizzCon Invitational have been chosen! We received hundreds of great entries, and the process of judging the winners was certainly not easy. In October, the StarCraft community’s eyes will be on the talented players flown in from across the globe competing on these maps.